In post 645, Claus wrote:Some undertale-related idle musings:
So I was playing Pillars of Eternity (a baldur's gate-like RPG released last year by obsidian), and it got me thinking about undertale.
The game is chock-full with subquests, and in one of them, a barbarian asks you to sacrifice a baby. There are three ways to complete the quest: 1- you sacrifice the baby, get your reward. Easy-peasy. 2- You say NO, and kill the barbarian - however, he is in a room full of enemies, so it is a very hard battle, and you get a heavy reputation penalty in the village for killing everyone. 3- you poison the barbarian. If you do that, you have to pass an EXTREMELY hard attribute test (as in, you basically have to metagame to pass it), or you are caught and it reverts back to scenario 2.
There are a lot of people on the internet complaining about that side quest, arguing that the game forces people to be baby murderers.
But, after playing Undertale, my mind goes to option 4. You just don't complete the quest, and forgo the little extra XP. In fact, Poe is full of self-contradicting side quests: if you complete every single side quest that is put in front of you, you will end up as a very unpredictable person. There is more than enough XP and items to go around, so it is perfectly valid to mold your character by only taking the side quests that you agree with. I find that cool.
(In fact, I found out that there IS a fourth option: you can take the baby, but not sacrifice it, leaving the quest uncompleted - the game will mention that choice in the end-game, when it describes what happened with your character after the adventure is done. This is never acknowledged before the end-game, though, and the "quest" marker sits there, blinking, taunting the Flowey within us)